Vice-President Mahamudu Bawumia has launched and handed over 350,000 laptops under the “One Teacher, One Laptop” programme in fulfilment of the government’s pledge to equip teachers with the requisite ICT skills to prepare the next generation for the Fourth Industrial Revolution.
At a brief but colourful ceremony at the campus of St Mary’s Senior High School in Accra on Friday 3 September 2021, the first batch of the laptops, known as the TM1 (Teachers Mate 1) were handed over to the 71 teachers of the school.
“Effective teaching and learning is critical to developing the human capacity for work, innovation and creativity; necessary ingredients for capacity-building. Teachers are the indispensable pillars to this necessary capacity-building.
“This initiative, in collaboration with the teacher unions, is to support the vision of the Ghana Education Service of creating an enabling environment to facilitate effective teaching and learning,” Dr Bawumia said.
Under the initiative, the government is to provide every teacher in Ghana, from kindergarten to the senior high school level, with a laptop preloaded with educational materials and with access to an e-library equipped with books on the various subjects, recommended by the Ghana Education Service (GES). The materials can be accessed online or offline, and there will be free wifi available in all 722 senior high schools across the country.
Access to the almost innumerable resources available on the internet is expected to aid research, teaching and learning.
The state will take up 70% of the cost of the laptop while the teacher makes up the difference. The laptop, however, becomes the personal property of the teacher and serves the benefit of providing a tool for developing the teacher’s professional and personal capacity.
Present at the ceremony were the Minister of Education, Dr Yaw Osei Adutwum, the director general of the Ghana Education Service, Professor Kwasi Opoku-Amankwa, and leaders of the teacher unions.
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This shift to ICT-based teaching and learning has many benefits for both teachers and students, according to experts in education. With the curriculum materials already installed on the laptops, the suggested lesson notes prepared by the National Council for Curriculum and Assessment (NaCCA) can be downloaded on to the laptops and used to end the burdensome task of writing lesson notes in notebooks.
This will perfectly be in tandem with the fifth skill and competence under the new standards-based curriculum: the promotion of digital literacy.
The laptops will also help in the field of assessment. The filling of school-based assessment report cards, cumulative records and the building of learners’ individual portfolios will become easier if each teacher owns a laptop.
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